An interesting perspective on "collaboration" - a buzzword often heard in the environmental movement these days:
The Wages of Compromise
When Environmentalists Collaborate
by MICHAEL DONNELLY
Spring is in the air in Oregon’s Willamette
Valley. Crocus and daffodil add a splash of late winter color. Trees
are budding. Days grow longer, the sun makes a cameo appearance…and,
like swallows to Capistrano, the usual suspects cadre of
eco-wonks/lawyers return to Eugene and the University of Oregon for the
30th Annual Public Interest Environmental Law Conference (E-LAW) March 1 – 4, 2012.
“Compromise
is often necessary, but it ought not to originate with environmental
leaders. Our role is to hold fast to what we believe is right, to fight
for it, to find allies, and to adduce all possible arguments for our
cause. If we cannot find enough vigor in us or our friends to win, then
let someone else propose the compromise, which we must then work hard to
coax our way. We thus become a nucleus around which activists can build
and function.” — David Brower, first Executive Director of the Sierra Club. This year PIELC officially celebrates the 100thAnniversary of Brower’s birth.
E-LAW is part employment bazaar for newly-minted attorneys seeking
jobs in the ever-expanding (much thanks to E-LAW) field of Environmental
Law. It is also part gathering of actual non-paid, in the trenches
eco-activists who are the ones who generate the resistance that leads to
all those legal jobs. What matters to the job seekers and the already
employed panelists who draw a paycheck derived from a cornucopia of
foundation-funded groups and what motivates the volunteer or underpaid
activists sometimes coincide and sometimes the activists are featured
panelists; but, most of the time the disconnect is palpable. Invariably,
PIELC becomes living proof of the Upton Sinclair dictum.
“It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” —Upton Sinclair
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